An Innate Fear of the Term Innate? (with David Rakison)

In this episode, we talk with the esteemed Dr. David Rakison about his research on categorization in older infants and young children. We then ask David to give us his hot take on the term innate and what evidence he'd need to convince him that something is, in fact, innate. We also discuss what the term mechanism really means as well as how to identify one when you see it. We also spend some time talking about how David teaches students to think about mechanism as well as the larger debate between nativists and empiricists. We conclude this episode by having David talk about his upbringing, what got him into psychology in the first place, and what he'd be doing if he weren't a developmental psychologist. There's even a brief discussion on the psychology of murder! PS. Deon woud like to apologize for the quality of his audio. He hopes to have this issue fixed by the next episode.